Dementia and its impact on comorbidities

Whilst dementia is an increasingly prevalent condition and often afflicts patients with multiple comorbidities, there is currently little training and education to assist medical specialists with the complications which arise from these diseases.

In an attempt to evaluate the varying training and education opportunities available, Professor Joseph Ibrahim of Monash University's Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine has conducted a systematic review of the dementia-related education available to medical specialists in Australia outside the domains of geriatrics, neurology and psychiatry.

Dementia related education was found to be absent from the training curricula for 14 of the medical specialties within Australia. Less than 0.10% (1,921 articles) of the more than two million articles published in the 138 journals assessed were dementia related.

In his study, Joseph identified an absence of formal education, training, and peer-reviewed literature for medical specialists about dementia—particularly around the impact of cognitive deficits and psychiatric symptoms on management of comorbid disease.